Brian Thompson: When you spend time on a field trip, you become painfully aware of your own age

Nothing reminds you you’re an adult like hanging out with a bunch of kids. On a field trip. In a school bus. It’s chaotic chatter — like birds in the trees — until one child starts humming Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Why Beethoven’s Ninth?

And then they all start to join in, one after another. Only … wait a minute … no, they’re not humming. They’re moo-ing. They are all moo-ing like cows! Beethoven! All of them now. Every last one. The bus is filled with the sound of bovines.

And I just have to smile.

Nothing reminds you you’re an adult like hanging out with a bunch of kids.

It’s field trip season at my daughter’s school. I’m back on chaperone duty. Fixing up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for myself and the kid. Knowing that it will be a flattened, oozing, soggy mess by the time I go to eat it. All those molecules fused together into something indescribably disgusting, yet incredibly delicious.

I “sweep” the bus, making sure no one gets left behind. And open up Slim Jim beef sticks for kids with puppy-dog eyes. I remember those as a kid. Spicy. The color red that no meat has ever looked. And loaded with all manner of things I can’t pronounce. Yet, I want one myself.

This trip literally went out into the fields. The country. Out to the corn maze at the Sykes and Cooper Farm in Elkton. Never mind that the odds of coming out of a corn maze with the same number of children you went in with aren’t in your favor.

Part of a chaperone’s job is to corral them in and corral them out. Or spend the rest of the day searching for the ones you lost.

But when you spend time on a field trip, you become painfully aware of your own age. That you are amongst the little people, and the little people always have more fun.

You’re reminded of it constantly.

Because when you’re a kid, everything is a minor miracle. Everything is amazing. On a hayride, when the guide points out the rows of squash dangling from the tips of now-wilting flowers, they all pile to the edge to see. They “Oooh!” in amazement for a vegetable they despise.

How they can find fascination with the most mundane. An actual comment I heard, and which almost caused a stampede: “Hey guys, look! Here’s where they paint the pumpkins!” It was a picnic table with a paint-smeared tablecloth. No pumpkins. No paintbrushes. No nothing. But they all had to see.

There was the corn popper — a cross between a bounce house and a trampoline. If you ask a child what Heaven is like or where they go when they die, they will tell you to a giant corn popper in the clouds.

Kids don’t jump on it. They launch themselves through the air like high velocity projectiles. As if they’re spring-loaded. Tossed about like rag dolls. Propelled in every direction. Some who looked like they would never land.

Kids crashed into each other. Every once in a while, one would come down, like a boxer retiring to the corner, clutching a red cheek. A teacher would hold an ice pack on it. Wipe away a tear. Tell him or her it was all right. Sad eyes said it all: “How did this happen? It had been so much fun. I’ll never do that again!” And then … WHOOOPIE! Gotta’ go. Gotta’ get back in there.

Ha-ha! The miracle recovery of a child. Undaunted. Carefree. Living it up. Living only in the present.

Ah, to live in in the present. The right now. Nothing else weighing on you — nothing but how many more jumps you can get in before the lady tells you it’s time to come down. Just … one … more!

No, that’s not us. We adults. We don’t really live in the present. Everything is glancing down the road. I looked at my phone — at the email piling up — then told myself to stop. To enjoy this, right now — this hootenanny in the hay fields. This chaos of laughter. A bouncing kid is the personification of joy. Maybe because they’re weightless for that microsecond — truly free from everything that tries to hold them. Free to enjoy that fraction of a second in any way they see fit. No care in the world.

Nothing reminds you you’re an adult like hanging out with a bunch of kids. It’ll teach you a lot, though. Like how once in a while you’ve got a take a moment to “moo” a little Beethoven and see it all through their eyes.